Taylor’s An Introduction to Austrian Economics (Selections)

Introduction – What distinguishes the Austrian school: (1) devotion to a deductive method aimed at conceptual understanding, (2) methodological individualism – seeing economic phenomena as the result of individual actions.

The Subjective Theory of Value – Value is fundamentally subjective. Even prices are the result of subjective valuations of amounts of money (and their expected eventual use) and the goods that are being traded for that money. Producing for exchange means that we need to consider not only our own preferences, but also the preferences of our buyers. The fact of subjective preference suggests that there is no “economic man” who is bound purely by monetary calculations. Rather, monetary concerns are balanced against other concerns as well. For example, anticipating modern behavioral economics and the idea of “bounded rationality”, Bohm-Bawerk points out that the process of economic calculation is, in itself, costly in terms of time and effort. So, for trivial matters, it is probably best to follow general heuristics, saving the effort of monetary calculation for larger matters where precision is more important.